Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER IV. MANTEGNA, MARCANTONIO, LUCAS OF LEYDEN, DURER AND HOLBEIN E now come to a small group of great engravers; two Italians, two Germans, and a Dutchman. Only one of them exceeded three score years and ten, and, with the same exception, all of them were at their best during those marvelous decades which closed the fifteenth century and opened the sixteenth, what time discovery, in the person of Columbus, doubled the world's area, and freedom of thought, in the person of Luther, set on foot the Reformation. Those forty years, 1480-1520, marked the full tide of the Renaissance; an age in which revived classicism almost completely usurped the place of medievalism; a time when the rank and file of men, high and low, whether occupied with political affairs or affairs ecclesiastical, were worldly to an extreme degree. It was an age in which many slow growths which mark the progress of civilization came to full bloom; such, for example, as architecture, personified by Bramante; painting, by Raphael; sculpture, by Michelangelo; and many other arts, among which engraving takes a foremost place; an age which more than any other produced the greatest of artist-draughtsmen. The Renaissance was a period of extraordinary intellectual activity which found expression in science and art; an epoch in which mankind had wonderfully beautiful thoughts about this world with its joyous life, and hands carefully trained from generation to generation for putting such thoughts into tangible forms. Hence it came about that the Renaissance was an epoch of great art; the root of which is good drawing, and one of the perfect flowers of which is great drawing done for its own sake, i.e., regarded as worth doing for its own sake by the greatest geniuses, and looked upon as precious beyond compare by...